(2026-05) Comparative Performance Analysis of MILP Solvers for Cryptanalysis
2026-05-05
This paper provides a performance comparison of five MILP solvers applied to related-key differential cryptanalysis of ITUbee [10]. We evaluate three open-source solvers (GLPK, HiGHS, SCIP) and two commercial solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX) using MILP models for 8, 10, and 12-round attacks. As rounds increase, the number of equations and con- straints grows exponentially. Experiments used an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor with 32 GB of RAM. Commercial solvers (Gurobi and CPLEX) perform better than open-source options, achieving up to 94× speedup compared to GLPK for the 12-round model. This work provides guidance for choosing a solver for MILP-based cryptanalysis.